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IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) has offered Fibre Channel Storage Virtualization since June 2003. Two SVC nodes communicate with each other via fibre channel to form a high availability I/O group. They then communicate with the storage that they virtualize via Fibre Channel and with the hosts they serve that virtual storage to, via Fibre Channel. When IBM added real-time (metro mirror) and... [More]

It's a story that has been repeated many times: You buy a shiny new storage system..... and it is beautiful. Then... a disk fails, which takes just the tiniest bit of shine off. No problem you declare! You place a service call and the disk is replaced. So far so good. But then as the vendor service representative is walking out the door, it suddenly occurs to you... hey, that person is... [More]

IBM has today announced a whole swag of planned new features across the entire IBM Storage product line. You can read the announcement letter here and I have also dropped the text at the bottom of this blog post (to save you clicking on the link). It's a very impressive list, but to hone in on a few of the more exciting offerings: IBM Easy Tier will be enhanced to cache hot data in SSD storage... [More]

One common question that I hear on a regular basis regards the availability of an SRA for VMware SRM 5.0 when using Storwize V7000 or IBM SVC running V6.3 firmware. This combination is currently unsupported as per the alert found here . The good news is that there are now IBM SRAs available for clients running SRM in combination with V6.3 firmware. While this combination is still not listed... [More]

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called How to spot an old IBMer . It was a sort of reminiscence about my early days with IBM but it turned out to be one that really touched a chord with many Big Blue veterans. In fact the response was overwhelming, I have never received more hits or more comments for anything I have written. It was also pleasing that these responses were almost universally... [More]

So you need to do some disk performance testing? Maybe some benchmarking? What tools are out there to help you out? Well I am glad you asked... here are some that I use on my daily travels: IOmeter IOmeter is an old classic, with emphasis on the word old. At time of writing, the most recent update was from 2006 . However it remains very popular mainly because it is free and easy to use.... [More]

Right now I am working on giving a client a recommended version of firmware for their Cisco MDS Fibre Channel switches. For FICON, the recommendations are easy, but for Open Systems there are so many choices. So what am I going to recommend? FICON Switches and Directors For FICON switches, sticking to the FICON (IBM Mainframe Fibre Connection) recommended versions (which are determined by the... [More]

If you work (or have worked) for IBM then you have probably met many old timers. IBMers who have been with the company for 25 years or more ( or even 50! ). But how do you spot an old IBMer? Is it by the cut of their suit? Not sure about that anymore. An IBM General Systems Division marketing rep in New Jersey in 1978. It's certainly not by their extensive beards. Development of the 3800... [More]

It is ironic that only days after I wrote that 497 is the IT number of the beast , I learn that Linux has another unfortunate number: 208. The reason for this is a defect in the internal Linux kernel used in recent firmware levels of SVC, Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified nodes. This defect will cause each node to reboot after 208 days of uptime. This issue exists in unfixed versions... [More]

I got a great question recently: We just updated our Cisco MDS9509s to NX-OS 4.2.7b (from Cisco SAN-OS 3.3.1c) and now we are getting emails from this source: GOLD-major. The actual message looks like this: Time of Event:2012-03-05 15:07:21 GMT+00:00 Message Name:GOLD-major Message Type:diagnostic System Name xxxx Contact Name xxx@xxx.com Contact Email xx@xxx.com Contact Phone:+61-3-xxxx-xxxx... [More]